I have a confession. Remember when I wrote about downsizing my parents' home, then wrote a book about it, as if I had this all on lock down? I cleared out the house, figured out what to keep, toss and sell, and sold the old homestead -- all inside a month.

Story by

Marni Jameson

Special to NOLA.com| The Times-Picayune

What I didn't tell you was that I hit a hard stop at the photos.

I packed up the boxes of snapshots and carousels of slides from my parents' home. But then I parked them at my brother's house in Los Angeles, where they've remained for three years in his garage stacked in a pile up to my elbows.

When I sorted through my family home, I simply did not have time to go through each image, nor did my brother. So our plan was for us to get together one night when I was back in town, open a bottle of wine, go through them, laugh, cry, make fun of each other, and feel nostalgic together.

Then we'd pull out the ones we wanted to keep and send them to a scanning service. This, by the way, is still a good plan.

And, like many good plans, this one, has remained a plan.

I'm thinking about my parents' photos and my own family's photos, feeling guilty and remiss recently while at a conference titled "Don't Leave Your Kids a Mess."
Diana Uricchio, owner of OXO Digital Organizing, in Orlando, Fla., was speaking about digital organizing, and I was feeling like a hypocrite.

"I can't even stay on top of my own photos, and I've also got my parents' to deal with," I said to Uricchio afterward.

When she started her business three years ago, after helping her mother-in-law tame her collection of important papers and photos, Uricchio's intent was to help clients digitize important documents, but today 90 percent of her business is digitally organizing photos.

"Given the cascade of images most of us now have with cell phones and digital sharing, organizing the present feels impossible, let alone the past," I said.

"It's probably the most emotionally draining and time-consuming project you can do," she said, which made me feel marginally better.

"But it's also one of the most rewarding, because you're doing what the adults in the family should do, take care of the history," she said.

"What makes people hit the breaking point and fix this?" I asked.

"Many want to cut the clutter, conquer the mayhem and downsize their material footprint," she said. "Others want to streamline, so they can find what they want more easily; a third motivator is security. Clients worry about what would happen to their important documents and photos in case of fire, flood or hurricane."

Another reason was so they could share. "Digitizing family photos and organizing them into albums can make the difference between family members reviewing their past and never looking at family photos at all," she said. "If they're not being organized, they won't be enjoyed."

"When they're done, they feel great," she said.

When you're ready to get digitally organized, here's how Uricchio says to start:

Take a digital inventory:
List all devices that have images on them and corral all important papers: wills, estate plans, Social Security cards, marriage licenses, birth certificates, medical directives, insurance policies and important financial papers.

Scan them:
Uricchio recommends buying a household scanner for documents but not for photos. Scanners that produce the quality you would want for photos are expensive. It's best to either outsource your photos to a scanning service (like ScanMyPhotos.com, which I've used) or rent a scanner to save images yourself.

Purge what you can:
Scanning is a great way to cut paper clutter. But not everyone can go completely paperless, and Uricchio doesn't recommend they do. Others don't mind letting go. It often depends on their tech savvy. "The low tech or no tech clients are not comfortable giving up the tangible," she said. You'll want to keep originals of the most vital documents, like birth and marriage certificates.

Back it up:
Have three copies of everything, Uricchio said. Have one copy of pictures and documents on your computer, another on an external hard drive, and a third stored on the cloud or on another external hard drive kept somewhere other than your home, such as a safe deposit box or at a relative's house. "If the house burns down with your paperwork, computer and flash drive inside, having a cloud-based automatic back up plan is digital insurance," she said.

Make it routine:
How long the process takes the first time varies by household, Uricchio said. But, in general, once a couple has pulled together all vital docs and photos, getting them in order and digitized takes about one weekend. After that, maintaining the photos takes about an hour or two each year.

Keep up with technology:
Anyone who can remember floppy disks knows how fast technology changes and how easily you could lose your memories to a lapse in digital migration. "Once a year, look back and see whether you need to convert from a last year's flash drive to the next latest, greatest format," she said to the woman who has two old laptops both loaded with photos that she can't even turn on. However, knowing what to do is the first step.

Syndicated columnist Marni Jameson is the author of two home and lifestyle books and the newly released "Downsizing the Family Home - What to Save, What to Let Go" (Sterling Publishing 2016).